Hello smart people,

I'm working on a project with my studio that has us rendering in redshift/solaris in houdini. I come from a gaming background and i'm trying to introduce workflows that speed things up but aren't heavy on render/compute time. One such technique are edge decal trim sheets, which are utilized in game creation and real time all the time. My solaris knowledge is extremely limited at the moment. I'm very comfortable with engines like UE4, and setting up edge decals in there is quite easy.
When i presented this idea to our shader person, he told me it's impossible to do it the same way as you'd do it in UE4/Unity in games. By using a separate geometry that you map your normal strips to and changing your shader settings to get the engine to display and show it properly.
I don't know enough to tell him he's wrong but he might very well be.

The idea is to only use normal+alpha maps. Not create a trim sheets with a whole texture set to go with it.
My question is, is there a different or any way at all to do this in solaris/redshift?

Thanks for the input.

I have no idea what edge decals or trim sheets are, but generally with raytracing changing opacity, whether with textures or shaders is not going to improve performance, and can usually tank it if too many layers are being opacity tested. With tracing, rays intersect the world and stop when they hit something that is opaque. If many things are not opaque, the ray has to intersect them and evaluate the opacity shader. It could be Redshift has some tricks to make this faster, I don't know, but in the naive raytracing case lots of opacity checks will slow the render way down.

Generally this hovering geo for decals and edge decal overlays is something that you don't do in the rendering/ vfx world, that's confined to realtime mostly. In addition to the cost of opacity that jsmack mentioned, you have a whole lot of other issues that arise. Self-shadowing, shaders doing their own sampling things (think: AO, curvature, reflections, refractions, etc) that "see" the floating decals..